From Busyness to Momentum: How to Take Back Control of Your Time

I taught a class for an AILA chapter recently, and the message hit home. We've all learned to survive by being busy, but that habit is killing your results. And in this episode, we're talking about taking back control of your time and attention so that you can build real momentum in your firm, not just have motion.

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Hey everyone, welcome back to this week's episode. I recently taught a class for an AILA chapter. That's the American Immigration Lawyers Association. And it landed so strongly that I wanted to share it here on the podcast.

Now, these are concepts I've talked about before, but not quite in this way. And after teaching it, I thought, this needs to live here too. So, today we're talking about how to trade being busy for actual results. And this is for every law firm owner who feels buried, like they're spinning hard, and ready to get back in control of their time and their attention. 

Every law firm owner I know wrestles with this, the constant battle against busyness. You are handling clients, you're solving problems, you're keeping your team moving, juggling deadlines, and so much of it is good work, even great work. But being busy doesn't have a natural off-ramp. There's no moment that pops up and says, okay, now it's time to slow down and reset. That moment doesn't come. So we just keep going. We keep spinning, and that's how we get stuck in what I call the cyclone of that work, that swirl where you're moving fast, but not necessarily steering.

Unless you get intentional, inertia will keep you there. It's easier to stay in motion than it is to pause and to reflect. But if you want space, if you want leverage, if you want alignment between how you spend your time and where you actually want to go, you have to create a new trajectory. It takes effort and momentum, but it is completely possible. And that is what this episode is about.

Here's the truth: No one's going to hand you space. Creating space is part of your job. Your job isn't only to practice law, it's to steward the business. And that means caring for the people, the systems, the strategy, and the culture that make your firm healthy. And that only happens when you intentionally claim control over your time and your attention. Your attention is a currency. And where you spend it determines your results.

We tell ourselves we have to respond to every urgent thing: client demands, court deadlines, team needs. It feels responsible, but it keeps you reactive. And so even when you are paid well to be at the whim of the world, you're still at the whim of the world. The shift happens when you decide to treat your time and attention as the most valuable resources you have. That is the game.

At Velocity Work, we use a rhythm called Monday Map, Friday Wrap. It is not rocket science, and that's the point. But here's how it works. Monday Map is where you plan your upcoming week. You pick a day, often a Friday afternoon or a Sunday, to map Monday through Friday. You decide ahead of time what gets your focus, and you put it on the calendar. And then you honor that plan throughout the week. Your job is to let your calendar be your boss.

Now, on the other hand, Friday Wrap is where you reflect. You look back and evaluate, and you carry lessons learned forward. So that's the cycle. Map, honor, reflect, repeat. There's a free guide for this on our website, and it's in the show notes if you want to go deeper. But I'm going to walk you through the key pieces here.

A lot of people resist structure. They'll say, I don't want to be boxed in. I want to do what I want, when I want. I get that. I mean, I've even heard from people, you know, that's why I left my job, is because I didn't want all of that structure. I didn't want to have to abide by that structure. But structure actually creates freedom.

David Allen, the author of Getting Things Done, uses one of my favorite analogies. He asks in some talk that he gave, do you like the double yellow lines on the road? And of course, you do. The person answers, yes. Yes, you do. They keep you safe, and they let you drive faster. 

Your calendar works the same way. The right amount of structure creates freedom. It creates momentum. And when your time is mapped intentionally, you replace overwhelm with clarity, and you build trust with yourself because you start doing what you said you would do. And you get more done in less time, not because you're grinding harder, but because you're making decisions ahead of time. That's our definition, our working definition of planning here at Velocity Work. Planning is making decisions ahead of time. Your calendar is not a cage; it is a runway. And it's where your goals take off.

Now, every week you begin with a brain dump. Your brain is meant for processing, not for storage. That's another David Allen quote. And if you plan from a head full of open loops, you'll miss things, and you'll overload yourself. So let's talk about how to do this. The first step is to create buckets. When you're doing your brain download, you need to divide your page or your document online into broad sections. Really generic, but this is an example. You could divide up the page or the document into legal work, admin, owner time, and personal.

Now make this fit your world. You label your buckets what makes sense for you. But the second step, after you've set up your page, is to empty your head. Write everything down. Big, small, whatever is holding space in your mind. If it needs a minute of your attention or effort, if you have to show up for it, it belongs on this page.

Now, step three, once you get everything down onto your paper or out of your head and into your document. Step three is to assign time to each item. Assign the length of time next to each thing that you wrote down. So you're going to estimate how long it will take.

Now, most people skip this step, but it is the most important step because if you don't have the amount of time that you're estimating that you're going to need to get this thing done, then you have no sense of what actually fits into a day.

If something's too vague on time, and you're you aren't sure, you're questioning yourself, I don't know how long that's going to take myself. Okay, break it into smaller pieces until you do have a better sense of the estimated time. You can't do this with everything, but with 95% of what you write down, this will work.

Once it's all out of your head, that's where clarity turns into commitment. You're going to look at your list and ask, okay, what really needs to happen this week, or whatever week you're planning for. Everything else can be deferred, delegated, or deleted. So if it can wait, defer it. If someone else can do it, delegate it. If it doesn't need to be done, delete it.

Now, don't stop at your list. We have this list, you've made some decisions about your list. Now, the power is putting it on your calendar. This is where so many people stop. They make a list, maybe even prioritize it, and they hope they'll find time to do it, and they hope that they get to cross these things off a list. But time isn't just found; time is made.

So literally, open up your calendar, right now if you want. And start placing blocks. Decide what gets done, when, and for how long. That is the act of ownership. When you see your week laid out visually, you'll know what fits, you'll know what doesn't, and where your attention truly belongs. Don't overthink it, just start. Your first draft of a mapped week doesn't need to be perfect; it just needs to exist because a calendar you actually use beats a perfect plan that never leaves your notebook.

Now, pay attention to your energy. Most owners have more horsepower early in the week, and then they fade by the Thursday, Friday. So don't schedule deep work when you are running on fumes. You know you're going to be running on fumes.

If you think best in the mornings, that's when you do strategy or drafting. That way, then you can save meetings or admin for afternoons. And if you've got a pile of tiny five-minute tasks, batch them and add up the total time it's going to take, because you would have put how much time next to each one. Add up the total time and create that block on your calendar. List those things inside that calendar event, inside the description. That will help keep your calendar clean and your focus intact. There'll be less context switching if you batch some of those things together.

Now, okay, you've got everything in your calendar. Remember, you are not a robot. When you start, you need to anticipate for a few things. So one, plan for about 50% of your week intentionally and leave the rest flexible. As you build the muscle of honoring your plan, then you can tighten it up. Then you can plan harder for more of the time in a week. But even when you're great at this, you should keep 20% open for the unexpected.

And before you finish planning, look at the plan, look at the map you've made, and ask yourself, would I put money on me honoring this plan? If the answer is no, make your brain come up with why. Anticipate the barriers now so that you can stay honest and you can adjust ahead of time.

I love this story from a CEO I once heard. It was on the Tim Ferriss podcast. He teaches this exact rhythm to his team. He doesn't call it Monday Map, Friday Wrap, but it's the same thing. And after about a week of his team members practicing this, they come back, and they say, your system doesn't work. It doesn't all fit. And he laughs, and he says, exactly. That's the point. Wouldn't you rather know that ahead of time instead of being deflated on Friday evening when you can see all the things you didn't do that you wanted to do? 

So when you see something that isn't going to fit, that just means you have choices. And it's better to have choices up front than to deal with the disappointment and the sense of defeat on the back end. Now, the first choice that you have, or the first option you have is to reset expectations. If it's not all going to fit, who do you need to talk to about the fact that this is going to be later than what you thought?

Now, another option you have is to delegate harder than what you currently are. Even partial pieces. Sometimes people will write down something on their list that needs to be done, and then they calendar it. But when they really think about that thing that's on the list, there's something inside of that task that could have been teed up for them. It could have reduced the amount of time they actually have to spend focusing on it. And so one of the options you have is to look at all the things that are important to get done this week and figure out what pieces of those things can be delegated.

Now, the other option is to defer to a later week. Now, this may mean that you have to reset expectations, but it just depends on the situation. But that's a choice. Or, and this is also a choice that you have, is to proactively choose to work late one night or two nights, whatever, but it's as a choice. It's not a default. The win is that you're steering instead of just spinning in a cyclone of work.

So if you are going to, you stay in control. That's the most important part. And if you are going to work late because you don't have an option, you don't, you're saying, so I'm going to believe you, right? But just probably part of a story that you are spinning. But if you really don't have an option, then decide ahead of time what nights you're working late and what you're going to get done in those hours that you're working late. This is keeping you in control.

Okay, once your week is mapped, the next challenge is to honor it. Calendar integrity means you do what you said you'd do, when you said you'd do it. You should fully expect resistance. When the time comes to do the thing, you're not going to feel like doing it.

If you planned something that's a little tough, that's hard, mental mentally hard work to do, or maybe it's tough for a different reason. If you planned for that thing at Tuesday at 11 o'clock, you can bet that when you sit down at 11 o'clock, you will not feel like doing what you said you were going to do at 11 o'clock.

Your brain in those moments will look for an out. It will look for an easy route. Maybe it'll want to check email, it'll want to grab a snack, it'll want to switch tasks to something else. That urge is normal. That urge is trying to escape discomfort of just doing the thing. So when that hits, the goal here is to just pause, take a breath, and don't answer the urge. Take a breath and just begin. And once you start, momentum will start to take over, once you get into the flow.

“Discomfort is the currency of your dreams.” And this fits right here. It's one of my favorite quotes. That was from Brook Castillo. And that is the discomfort that needs to be overcome. That is the currency for your dreams. Every time you move towards discomfort instead of away from it, you build self-trust.

A client once called this virtuous procrastination, which he defined as working on something important, just not the thing you said you'd do right now. And it feels productive. It's very easy to justify, but it breaks integrity. And each time you honor your plan, you strengthen trust with yourself. Each time you avoid your plan, or you answer the urge to do something different than what you said you were going to do, you chip away at that trust.

So, set yourself up for success. When it's time to sit down to do these things, shut off notifications, close your door, tell your team when you'll be available. And at the start of each block, sometimes it helps to say out loud, all right, I've decided to do this now. Let's go. Treat that block like a client meeting. You wouldn't skip a client meeting, so don't skip things like this. Don't skip what you said was important enough to make it to your calendar. And when things go sideways, when unexpected things come up because they will, just make a note and learn from it in your Friday Wrap. The goal is not perfection, it's consistency.

Okay, now, you have a week where you had planned and you worked to honor the plan. At the end of each week, reflect. Ask two questions. Number one, what were my top one to three accomplishments this week? Just pull out of all the things you did this week, the top one, at least one, up to three accomplishments. Now the second question you're going to ask yourself, what's the biggest lesson I learned about how I showed up and how I operated?

When you're doing lessons learned, sometimes people will focus on the circumstances that came about instead of focusing on themselves. The lesson needs to be about you and how you operated. So keep the focus on you, not on circumstances or other people. And this builds awareness, which allows you to gain momentum and take more and more ownership over the results you create with the time that you have.

Acknowledge the wins. You know, that first question about what were your accomplishments. You don't need to, this isn't about throwing a party or, you know, having confetti go off and woohoo. It's just about acknowledgement.

And a quick tip when it comes to Friday Wrap because these two things, psychologically, these things are important. One, to acknowledge accomplishments, and the other is to reflect and extract lessons learned that you can carry forward. And when you do your Friday Wrap, often times what makes sense is people will do the Friday Wrap, so they'll reflect on the week they just had, and then they'll roll right into mapping the next week.

So often times people will combine these and do them both on a Friday. That way, it's all still fresh in your mind. You'll reduce friction when you're when you are planning for the upcoming week if you do it right when you were doing Friday Wrap.

The last thing I want to talk with you about is this idea of micro versus macro when it comes to planning and knowing what you're aiming for. Everything we've talked about in this episode is focusing on the micro. The micro is how you move through time day-to-day and week-to-week. The macro is your strategic direction, what you're aiming for, and the plan to get there. When you align the micro with the macro, you grow with sanity. You grow with reduced friction, which will increase momentum.

Owners who plan intentionally at both levels, the macro and the micro, always fly further, faster than those who just react, than those who stay in the cyclone of busyness. And this is what we do at Velocity Work, helping law firm owners create clarity and systems for both the big picture and the daily rhythm so the business serves the life you actually want.

Let me share a few common questions I get about this practice. First, okay, I work better under pressure, Melissa. When I plan ahead, I end up procrastinating because it feels like I have the time. So here's what I would say. Start small. Plan half a day. You know we talked about only plan for 50% of your calendar and just let the other 50% just run your game as you normally do. That will allow you to build the muscle.

So plan a half day and follow it exactly. Do what it takes to be in integrity with your calendar. And when the urge to delay hits, stay put. Don't escape yourself. Every rep of following through builds self-trust, and that's the whole point. The self-trust is the key.

Another question I get, what about unexpected fires like a website crashing, an employee quitting, a client having an emergency? All right, those things are going to happen. So when those things happen, the most important thing is that you just take a beat. You pause. You reassess and rearrange your plan consciously, being intentional.

So often times something flares up and we feel like we need to deal with it, which we'll talk about emergencies in a bit. But you feel like you need to deal with it, and so you drop what you were doing, you go put out the fire, and then it just rolls, rolls, rolls, like all intentionality is lost after that.

So with this, you pause, you look at, okay, I have buffer time in my schedule. Everybody should. Everybody, no matter how good you are at this. I'm going to put this over here in my buffer time. I'm going to deal now with the emergency. So you are, you are still in control from a planning perspective, and that allows you to make sure you're taking the reins where you can take the reins, and you don't just get sucked up into a cyclone of work.

You know, emergencies are going to happen, and the goal is not to prevent them. I mean, if you can prevent them, you should, but the unexpected is going to happen, and to respond with control, not panic. And when your priorities are already visible on the calendar, you can make informed tradeoffs instead of just getting swept away.

Another question I get is about what is a true emergency? You have to define that for yourself. If you haven't defined what a true emergency is, you need to do that. Most of the time when we're working with people on this, they have like one to three things that are a legitimate emergency that means you have to drop what you're doing, and no matter what you're doing, someone needs to come and interrupt you.

Other than that, if someone, if a client's calling with something or something's happening, you can usually finish what you're doing and then go give attention to it. So don't just drop what you're doing. Have your idea of what is a definition of emergency so that you are doing a good job of staying intentional and not getting swept away by what's happening, the set of circumstances in the day.

Another question I get is I have limited time. Like, how do I make this work? This whole exercise is about getting honest. You need to get honest about the time you have and about what fits in the time you have. And doing that proactively matters. So be honest about the container. And if it, the work that you have outlined, doesn't fit, it's not going to happen.

So that may mean that you can't handle what you thought you could handle. It may mean that you need tighter boundaries or that you need to find ways to expand capacity. But seeing the truth on a calendar is what gives you control. And from there, you can choose the tradeoff.

So I don't care how much time you have. It doesn't matter. It's math. If you have this much time and you have things that need to go in it and you are trying to work it so that it fits, but you can't find a way it fits, you keep having to undercut or shortcut things, it doesn't fit. So, what are you going to do with that information?

And what most people do is they hit their week with their eyes closed and their fingers crossed and a to-do list that they're going to they're going to mark off. And by the end of the week, they open their eyes, and they're like, I didn't get done what I wanted to get done.

That is what you're avoiding. So I don't care how much time you have or don't have. We all have the same amount of time. Maybe you have less work hours. Maybe that's a thing because of a circumstances in your life. But you still have a container and work that fits into the container. And if you are proactive about that, you'll be in much greater control over the results you create and how you move through work.

All right, another question. How late should I work? Well, okay, how late at night? People talk about working nights and weekends, which I don't want clients to do, but sometimes they've made their bed and it's going to take them a bit to make a new scenario for themselves. So when they're talking about how late they should work, here's what I know for sure. Sleep is a superpower and it really should be protected.

If you are unable to get sleep you need because you can't stop working, and that is a that's a that's a common thing for you, you need to have a look and start to readjust. You need to set your work hours on purpose. Yes, there may be a night or two where you choose to work late, but that's the key word is that you're choosing it. You're not just running into, you know, a midnight working to midnight, even if even if you're sitting in your bed working on your laptop, that's work.

So you have to be mindful about putting guardrails up with the work hours that you're going to work. That's your container. Now, if you keep operating reactively, you are not going to get out of the cyclone. So again, the same theme applies that we've been talking about over and over and over with every question that I get.

This practice isn't about perfection, and I really need you to hear that because so many of you that tune into this have the same bone in your body that I have that is perfectionistic and that's what you strive for, even though you know you shouldn't. But this really is not about perfection; it is about progress. It's about being intentional.

And some weeks, they're going to flow well. And some are going to blow up. You keep going. And when you keep showing up for this, mapping, honoring, and reflecting, you'll notice that you waste less energy, that you stay more centered, and you start feeling like the owner again. Map your week, honor that plan, wrap your week with intention, and repeat.

If you want to go deeper, head to velocitywork.com, grab the free Monday Map, Friday Wrap guide, or to schedule a conversation with us. And if you haven't yet, subscribe to The Law Firm Owner Podcast. We've been publishing weekly for six years, and every episode is built to be useful. 

Thank you for listening, and I'll see you next Tuesday. Cheers to showing up for your calendar, for your business, and for yourself.

Hey, want to watch the video of this episode? Head over to Velocity Work’s YouTube channel. You’ll find the link in the show notes.

You may not know this, but there's a free guide for a process I teach called Monday Map Friday Wrap. If you go to velocitywork.com, it's all yours. It's about how to plan your time and honor your plans so that week over week, more work that moves the needle is getting done in less time. Go to velocitywork.com to get your free copy.

Thank you for listening to The Law Firm Owner Podcast. If you're ready to get clearer on your vision, data, and mindset, then head over to VelocityWork.com where you can plug in to quarterly Strategic Planning, with accountability and coaching in between. This is the work that creates Velocity.